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Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub

606 pointsby dhruv3006yesterday at 1:59 PM389 commentsview on HN

Github has been down consistently over the last few months - does it make sense to switch to alternatives?


Comments

0xbadcafebeeyesterday at 11:05 PM

I have a pretty bad taste in my mouth from GitHub, GitLab, Forgejo, Gitea, etc. They all attempt to hijack Git itself and become a monolith and single custom interface, rather than independent components that work around the Git repo. I want the Unix philosophy applied to Git and other functions. That way I'm not forced to switch the entire kitchen sink out when some single piece of functionality or hoster ends up breaking things.

show 1 reply
adityaathalyetoday at 5:43 AM

Old skool is best skool... There is wisdom in keeping these decoupled:

- 1. your central code review (and hosting), which is the critical choke-point on team collaboration.

versus

- 2. the ever-expanding ick of testing, building, deploying it etc... because failure modes of software construction infra are concentrated here.

  ---
1. Code review (and hosting): Keep this in-house always.

Use Gerrit if you care about code review.

Code review workflow is the nub / hub of collaboration, and should never be blocked on anything else failing, including itself. Maintaining robust in-house code review infra. is work, yes, but it is quite manageable. Simple "single-box with full point-in-time snapshot recovery" designs will remain good for a long, long time... Think; workloads of teams of up to a few hundred programmers and bots, who would be pushing and pulling updates against multiple repositories at a time on a single, well-endowed, Gerrit box.

2. CI/CD: Use whatever works best economically.

Be it one giant in-house box running Jenkins, or a clever way to use github and gitlab's job infra as fallbacks for each other.

These systems fail often because pretty much all the ick of software construction is concentrated here. Be it simple test runners, or fancy end-to-end auto-deploy to rollback pipelines.

The mind-numbing ick of software supply chain dependencies, test run jobs, build jobs, failures / retries, bursts of high contention (lots of people / bots needing their test runs passing NOW), pulling and pushing artefacts, and so forth.

This is a true pain to manage, particularly in organisations that are laissez-faire about their software ecosystem ("best tool for the job" mentality etc.).

And on a personal note...

  --- <begin rant> ---
I strongly prefer to keep it all in-house. Proprietary software is oil - capital. Own it fully, no exceptions. This was true "back then", and it has become even more business-critical now, for obvious reasons.

As if trusting enterprise chat SaaSes with all your company secrets wasn't bad enough. At least that has some contractual defensibility.

Had. Had... Now? Something is deeply wrong with people who aren't completely spooked by the current fad of letting hyperscalers steal literally everyone's data to make content and code re-production autobots. Based on how those companies have behaved from the get-go, and factoring in the overwhelming pressure the LLM industry has created to "become the biggest, no matter what, because biggest wins"; their "terms of service" are as good as their high-flying CEO's mood on a given day.

No thanks.

Besides, it's only been a hot minute since I adjusted to that other fait acompli of 21st century computing.

They who controleth thy hypervisor, controleth thy destiny.

--- Ye Olde Graybeard Wisdom

  --- <end rant> ---
(edit: fix formatting, typos)
Gronnfalkyesterday at 7:27 PM

Try Gitlab, Bitbucket, or Codeberg.

emeraldlinexyesterday at 6:04 PM

GitHub is like World of Warcraft, in that you can’t kill it with another GitHub.

zuzululuyesterday at 5:21 PM

I want to know what the best guide is for running your code repo at homelab type of setup? proxmox? what hardware to buy?

i dont wanna get too crazy i just dont trust github with my code anymore

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fortran77yesterday at 5:05 PM

I loved the simplicity of Amazon CodeCommit. Unfortunately, Amazon decided to deprecate it, no new provisionion but existing accounts could remain. I'd love it if someone else offered a similar product.

AtlasBarfedyesterday at 4:25 PM

I'd like a self-hosted primary option as the source code repository, but I'd like to mirror the code in one of the usual external options, anyone done anything like that?

anticensoryesterday at 2:35 PM

If you accept a non-Git VCS, Pijul Nest.

timetraveller26yesterday at 3:39 PM

For CI/CD woodpecker has been working for us really well https://woodpecker-ci.org/

joeyguerratoday at 2:37 AM

Not really. Is it stopping your work?

bdloweryyesterday at 3:20 PM

use codeberg if you're ok with never using ai in any of your projects. Any AI use and your repo is banned. - https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

rvzyesterday at 2:46 PM

It is time to switch to self-hostable alternatives.

It made sense 6 years ago as I said before [0], today it makes even more sense to self host with GitLab, Gitea or Forgejo.

...Or we can repeat the same issues again with Cursor Origin [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22868406

[1] https://cursor.com/origin

ismailperimtoday at 8:26 AM

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neilbbtoday at 2:41 AM

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mavensumtoday at 7:08 AM

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Healer_0yesterday at 3:35 PM

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1saadcodesyesterday at 4:26 PM

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marcfrommeliousyesterday at 7:22 PM

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mdkaifansari04yesterday at 5:59 PM

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AnonFBCyesterday at 2:16 PM

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malindhamsarayesterday at 2:44 PM

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beanjuiceIIyesterday at 2:39 PM

i use it quite often and it has not really been 'consistently down'

throwitaway222yesterday at 10:31 PM

I wonder how hard it would be to vibe code a super basic gitea/gitlab clone (or a very stripped down version) that's designed to just have basic authentication w/ssh, some basic main branch protections, simple code review, etc... and runners with some simple YAML language.

I bet you could do it with like 10 prompts.